THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

Edited by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson Routledge London and Newyork 2007

Barbarians, Gothic art, and national consciousness. ‘I like this word

“barbarians” – I welcome it. Yes, it means “bursting with new sap,
full of life and cheerfulness”.’ Secondly, Michelet contrasted classical
Chapter Thirty-Six
art, ‘old art, which adored the physical’, with ‘modern art’, that is,
medieval art, Gothic art (barbarism had become a positive value),
What did the Twelfth-Century ‘the child of soul and spirit’. And thirdly, the Middle Ages saw the
realisation of ‘that great progressive interior movement of the
Renaissance Mean? national soul’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from Jacques
Bonhomme to Joan of Arc, from the peasant ‘goodman’, to the
peasant-woman, rebels both (Le Goff 1977: 19–45).
What glimmer of light is there in the twelfth century, though?
None, none at all. For in Michelet’s vision, ‘the beautiful Middle Ages’
did not belong to the culture of the powerful but to the soul of the
Jacques Le Goff people: ‘we other barbarians have a natural advantage – the upper
classes may have culture but we have so much more of the warmth
of life!’ If the medieval period was one of greatness, that derived
from the union of religion with the people. ‘The Church at that time
was the people’s home … Religious cult was a tender dialogue

T he idea of renaissance, which Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of

the Renaissance in Italy (1860) implanted so securely in
European historiography, appeared to have condemned the medieval
between God, the Church and the people, expressing one and the
same thinking.’ But Michelet’s ‘beautiful Middle Ages’ waned bit by
bit. In 1855, he abandoned them, rejecting ‘the bizarre and
period to languish forever in the dungeon of ‘the Dark Ages’ to which monstrous and amazingly artificial medieval condition’. His
Petrarch, the sixteenth-century humanists and, most inexorably of deliverance came not through the Renaissance but through the
all, the scholars of the Enlightenment, from Leibnitz to Voltaire, had Reformation, and especially through Luther: ‘it was entirely salutary
consigned it. Against Voltaire’s judgment, issued in his Essay on for me to live with that great heart who said No to the Middle Ages’.
Manners (1756), no appeal seemed possible: ‘The whole of Europe Yet Burckhardt’s enthronement of the Renaissance did not take
lay sunk in this debased state until the sixteenth century, and even long to evoke doubts in the minds of some historians. In the late
then only emerged through frightful convulsions.’ nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a reaction in
Nor, despite appearances, did Romanticism succeed in favour of the Middle Ages. Its chief manifestation was paradoxical,
rediscovering the light of the Middle Ages. In fact, all it did was to however. These new Middle Ages stole from the Renaissance its title,
pierce these traditional shadows with a few bright shafts. Lessing its sign, its proud banner. These new Middle Ages did not invent the
put it well: ‘The night of the Middle Ages, yes indeed! But it was a Renaissance as it appeared in the fifteenth and especially the
night shining with stars.’ Michelet himself, after imagining the Middle sixteenth centuries, defined, as it had been then, in opposition to
Ages as ‘beautiful’, plunged them back into darkest gloom. In the the whole preceding medieval period: they invented a string of
first edition of his History of France, written between 1833 and 1844, earlier renaissances, including one great Renaissance of their own. It
Michelet saw three great flashes of light in the Middle Ages: the was Charles Homer Haskins who fixed its date firmly in the book he
published in 1927, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Haskins Bernard’s metaphor appears, is devoted to Aristotle’s Peri
explained in his Preface: ‘To the most important of the earlier hermeneias. True, M.-D. Chenu thought of the twelfth century as an
revivals the present volume is devoted, the Renaissance of the age when a variety of platonisms bloomed (Chenu 1957: 108–41).
Twelfth Century, which is often called the Medieval Renaissance’ True, Ovid’s Art of Love so seduced twelfth-century poets and writers
(Haskins 1927: viii). of romances that the period has been termed an Ovidian age:
This idea flourishes more strongly than ever today, and I want to Chrétien of Troyes plagiarised The Art of Love, while the Cistercian
devote this chapter to a discussion of four problems it raises: (1) Aelred of Rievaulx, and Peter of Blois, who was John of Salisbury’s
Were twelfth-century people, or anyway the most distinguished student and a member of the scholarly circle at the archiepiscopal
twelfth-century scholars, conscious of living in an age of renewal? court of Thomas Becket (the ‘eruditus Sanctus Thomas’), ransacked
(2) What was the nature of this renaissance? Was it a rediscovery of Cicero’s treatise On Friendship (Paré, Brunet, Tremblay 1933: 48).
classical Antiquity, a return to Antiquity, or was it a creative Yet the term ‘moderns’ was applied, still more significantly, to
movement, a birth rather than a re-birth? Was it, to repeat the theologians and Christian ‘authorities’. The Liber pancrisis, an ‘all-
question asked by Peter von Moos, a Renaissance or a century of gold’ anthology of citations treasured as authorities, added to the
Enlightenment (von Moos 1989)? (3) Was it limited to the realm of sayings of the Fathers – Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory,
intellectual high culture, that is, to philosophy, theology, science and Isidore and Bede – those of writers here termed ‘modern masters’
art? Or was it associated with more general creative impulses that (magistri moderni), such as William of Champeaux (who taught at
were also economic, social and political? If so, was it an aspect or a St-Victor near Paris from 1108 to 1113, then became bishop of
consequence of those wider impulses? (4) Accepting the idea and Châlons-sur-Marne), Ivo of Chartres (died c.1116), Anselm of Laon
the label, when did this Renaissance begin and end? First, then, (died 1117) and his brother Ralf. What is important here is not so
were twelfth-century scholars aware of their own intellectual much the adding on to authorities of ancient vintage other
superiority over the great thinkers of Antiquity? Modern historians authorities of recent times, but the nature of these ‘modern’ ones.
have found support for the idea that they were, in a famous but These recent authorities were masters (magistri) in the urban
difficult passage in John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, written c.1159. schools, which, at the beginning of the twelfth century, were often
Here John purported to quote a famous teacher, Bernard of still episcopal schools. At the close of that century, these men were
Chartres, who had been chancellor of the cathedral school from thought to be re-embodied, so to speak, above all in the masters of
1119 to 1126: ‘We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. the budding universities. M-D. Chenu has shown very clearly how
Our gaze can thus extend more widely and reach further than theirs. these new authorities, known as magistralia, gained importance
It is not that we see better than they did, of course, nor that our during the twelfth century not in opposition to but alongside the
own height gives us any advantage. It is rather that we are carried ancient ones, the authentica (Chenu 1957: 351–65). The challenge
and raised up by the giants’ lofty stature’ (Webb 1929: 136). The posed by the moderns lay not in rejecting the ancients, or trying to
dwarfs were the moderni, the giants the antiqui. We have got used prove them inferior, but in denying them a monopoly on doctrinal
to thinking of ‘the ancients’ as referring particularly to the writers of authority. In the ninth century, Walhfrid Strabo, one of the great
pagan Antiquity, hence of the twelfth-century renaissance as men of the so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ (the first of the
consisting first and foremost of a return to Greek and Latin medieval renaissances) spoke of his own age as ‘modern times’
philosophers, poets and grammarians, and Roman historians. True, (saeculum modernum). Yet where that earlier ‘renaissance’ had
the chapter of the Metalogicon (iii. 4) in which John’s comment on really failed, the twelfth-century philosophers and theologians
succeeded in imposing a new periodisation of knowledge and of He goes on: ‘Our age benefits from what it gains from the ages that
what counted as authorities. The age of the Fathers was over, no went before it. It often knows more – yet that superiority comes not
question about it: the age of the masters had arrived. Scholasticism from its own talents (ingenium) but from the fact that it depends on
began to hold sway. another’s strength and on the vast wealth of its ancestors.’ According
John of Salisbury’s story about Bernard of Chartres, with the to William of Conches, one of the great masters of the School of
metaphor of the dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, was to Chartres: ‘Priscian rightly said that the Moderns are more
become a commonplace among writers of the second half of the perspicacious than the Ancients, not that they are wiser. The
twelfth century and the early thirteenth. It has been interpreted in Ancients only had their own writings at their disposal. We, however,
different ways, even in ways that are diametrically opposed: on the possess all their writings and, in addition, all that has been written
one hand, it has been said to convey the overwhelming superiority from the beginning right up until our own times. Furthermore, we
of the Ancients, on the other hand, to assert the superiority of the have more perspicacity than they had, but no more wisdom. Much
Moderns, even to imply an idea of progress. We should note at the greater wisdom is indeed required to discover something new. That
outset that this second interpretation simply develops a view is why we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. …We
expressed in the sixth century by the great grammarian Priscian see more things than the Ancients because our modest writings are
whose work was well-known to twelfth-century scholars: ‘quanto added to their great ones.’ The conclusion is clear: ‘The Ancients
juniores, tanto perspicaciores’ (‘the younger they are, the more were better than the Moderns’ (Jeauneau 1967: 84; Jeauneau 1968:
perspicacious’) (Ladner 1982: 8). Twelfth-century writers themselves 23–6).
seem to have veered between the two positions. John of Salisbury, One last example, which brings in a further dimension. It occurs in
the most eminent of them, asserted at one point elsewhere in the a letter of Peter of Blois: ‘How the dogs bark! How the pigs grunt!
Metalogicon, ‘I have not thought it worthwhile to quote the Moderns, For my own part, I am always full of enthusiasm for the writings of
whom I have no hesitation in preferring most of the time to the the Ancients. … We are all of us like dwarfs on the shoulders of
Ancients.’ At another point, he asks, ‘Who today is satisified with giants. Thanks to them, we see further than they could see when,
what Aristotle teaches in the Peri hermeneias?’ Yet John also says, attaching ourselves to the works of the Ancients, we give new life to
‘Though as far as meaning goes, the Moderns and the Ancients are their finest phrases’ (Le Goff 1993: 14). This is not merely a claim
as good as each other, what is old is more worthy of veneration’ for the superiority of the Ancients, it is, above all, a demand that
(‘venerabilior est vetustas’) (Webb 1929: 3–4, 135–6). Among those they should be studied, because this is how the Moderns can
twelfth-century writers who, implicitly or explicitly, cite the saying of surpass them.
Bernard of Chartres, most tend to affirm the superiority of the We are now in a position to pin down just what the superiority of
Ancients. This is the case, as Edouard Jeauneau rightly observed, the Moderns over the Ancients meant, and also to see its limits. It is
with two of the most innovative and combative thinkers of the a quantitative superiority. It stems from a cumulative conception of
twelfth century: Peter Abelard and William of Conches. Abelard, learning and of thought. It shows itself in the field of accumulated
whom John of Salisbury also quotes, says that it would be easy to be knowledge that is more plentiful and more penetrating, but not in
‘a man of his time’, to write a book about logic which would not be the field of wisdom. What does that mean? On the one hand, the
inferior in form or content to those of the Ancients. Nevertheless he Moderns suffer by not having the advantage of the prestige of
adds: ‘but it would be impossible, or at least very difficult, for such a antiquity already affirmed in the Old Testament: ‘With the ancient is
[modern] philosopher to raise himself … to the rank of an authority’. wisdom’ (Job XII, 12). Yet is this not at the same time an incitement
to the Moderns to acquire wisdom as well, on the model of biblical restlessness (rather than humility) in the face of intellectual
and pagan wisdom? Is it not an invitation to the Moderns to crown weaknesses that would not allow them to dispense with the
their learning, the fruit of the liberal arts and theology, with the authority of the Ancients. Medieval society, in every field, was always
making of a wisdom whose twin sources are biblical exegesis, that a brittle form of human nature.
is, the perfecting of an understanding (lectura) of Holy Writ (the What needs to be examined more closely is the historical context
sacra pagina), and philosophical thought which is more or less of this discussion between the relative values of Ancients and
independent of theology? Moderns. For the context in which that discussion developed throws
Was not the twelfth century a great age of the renewal of biblical into relief the ambiguity of the Moderns’ appeal to the Ancients.
exegesis, starting with the work of the thinkers of St-Victor, Paris, as Against whom were they trying to assert themselves? They were
Beryl Smalley demonstrated so well (Smalley 1968; Smalley 1983: fighting on two fronts. First they confronted the traditionalists, who
83–195)? Was it not also a great age of affirmation of a specifically were especially powerfully entrenched in the monastic world, at
Christian philosophy rooted in a Christian Socratism constructed in Cluny. More than a monastic order among other orders, Cluny was a
different but equally profound ways by the two great adversaries, veritable monastic ecclesia carrying enormous weight in the Church
Abelard and St Bernard? The driving idea which inspired the use of as a whole. Dominique Iogna Prat has recently highlighted Cluny’s
the metaphor of the dwarfs borne on the shoulders of giants was passionate engagement in ‘ordering’ Christian society on the basis of
fundamentally the discovery and powerful assertion of a sense of patristic doctrine and of the ‘ancestral custom’ worked out in Late
history. This sense was ambivalent: what comes after is, from one Antiquity (Iogna Prat 1998).
point of view, superior, richer and weightier, and yet what comes The pagan Ancients were always suspect in the minds of the
before also embodies a kind of superiority: it is more venerable, guarantors of the Christian order and the ancient Christian traditions
quite literally, more worthy of respect. This connection between to which the Modern writers and thinkers explicitly or implicitly
authority and age in a sense bound both to the past. But twelfth- attached themselves. Were the Moderns not closer to evangelical
century scholars, in harmony with the increased valuation conferred currents, to the evangelical renewal which the new religious
by development through history, were in the process of inventing a movements of monks and canons, who were sometimes denounced
way of transcending the contradiction between Modernity and as heretics, wanted to promote? These reformers’ goal was not a
Antiquity, Modernity and Authority. This way was embodied in a new literary and philosophical renaissance, but an evangelical one. From
kind of man, defined by his historical context, a new kind of another angle, the Moderns worried about those among their own
intellectual: the magister. By means of new biblical exegesis, more contemporaries who, far from searching for wisdom, wanted to
authentic and more accurate as far as literal meaning went, yet at exploit new intellectual techniques to extract worldly profit of a quite
the same time new, created by Christian philosophy, the magistri put material and monetary kind. These technicians sought to establish
in place a new balance between the study of texts, scholarly new intellectual fashions. These were the men John of Salisbury
research and the production of knowledge in the double form of labelled the Cornificians: they bid fair to divert modernity from the
what was spoken and what was written. Above all, the magistri quest for wisdom (Webb 1929: 23). For modern dwarfs, ancient
created the authority that the Moderns lacked when they confronted giants constituted a weapon that was both offensive and defensive.
the Ancients. The confusion, the contradictory attitudes, of twelfth- It was to translate this ambiguity and this embarrassment that
century thinkers confronted by a double Antiquity, pagan and twentieth-century historians invented the term the Twelfth-century
Christian, were expressions of pride in a creative renovatio and Renaissance.
 saw it in Hugh of St-Victor’s Didascalion (1130–40) ‘where the term
historia is used as often as the term logica and more often than
dialectica’ – was fundamentally the most important statement of
those who used the metaphor of the dwarfs and the giants (Chenu
1974). We ought not to forget that in the twelfth century the
dominant vision of historical evolution was that of the Ages of Man.
This vision obeyed a law of decline which ended by representing the
present time as that of old age: mundus senescit (‘the world grows
old’). Behind the resort to the image of the Moderns as dwarfs, in a
reversal of perspective that gave the metaphor exceptional, even
revolutionary, force, was a more or less veiled reference to the idea
of the most extreme partisans of decline, who claimed that men
were getting smaller and smaller, and that this shrinkage in size was
a tangible illustration of humanity’s general decadence.
What remained to the Moderns was to fight decisively against the
idea of decline, by offering a new inversion of meaning in an area of
fierce debate, the area of novelty. In preference to dealing with the
dwarfs and giants as a pair, the Moderns threw themselves into
battle against another pair of terms: nova et vetera, new and old.
‘New’ was clearer than ‘modern’, old age was less to be venerated
than antiquity.
At the beginning of the twelfth century, one family of words was
especially hateful to the Church, the monks and the clergy: these
words clustered around novus, novitas (‘new’, ‘novelty’). The terms
evoked the novissima, the Last Things, the Apocalypse, the end of
the world. They denoted the worst errors of mind and conduct.
When in 1116, the inhabitants of the town of Laon rebelled against
their bishop, who was also their lord, with shouts of ‘Commune!
Figure 36.1 Ancient and modern. A copy of the Gloss on St John’s commune!’ (‘the common interest’), the Benedictine abbot Guibert of
Gospel with particular glosses attributed to ‘Anselmus’ (Anselm of Nogent shouted back: ‘Commune: a new and detestable word!’ In
Laon), taken from the ninth-century commentary by John the Scot. the field of doctrine, ‘novelty’, lack of respect for tradition and
© Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Lyell 1, fo. 4r. stability, was firmly to be condemned. There was a strong risk that it
might lead to heresy. This is just what happened in the case of
There is more to this story. The difficult discovery, or re-discovery, Abelard. At the Council of Sens (1140), Abelard was condemned as a
of History (the term historia itself is ambiguous) in which M.-D. heretic. His chief accuser was William of St-Thierry, the tool of St
Chenu discerned the heart of the twelfth century’s dynamism – he Bernard. William declared that Abelard had started ‘to teach and
write novelties’ (Leclercq 1969: 377). In the course of the twelfth author of the Life conveyed their programme, and expressed his own
century mentalities changed, however. From being a negative term, admiration (Vicaire 1977: 103–5, 280–1). The first ‘official’
the new became, first, neutral (almost the equivalent of our biographer of St Francis, Thomas of Celano, intended to arouse
‘modern’, or ‘contemporary’), and then, positive. Alan of Lille, a praise for the saint and his order when he exclaimed:
distinguished university master who died c.1203, clothed in the
Cistercian habit, balanced new things and old things, as Marie- Novus ordo, nova vita
Thérèse d’Alverny has clearly shown (d’Alverny 1968: 117–35). Mundo surgit inaudita!
Walter Map, chancellor of Lincoln (1186–9) and archdeacon of
Oxford (1196–1209/10), contrasted the ‘novelties’ of modern (‘A new order, a new kind of religious life, has risen up, which was
masters to ‘the older masters’, and made the twelfth century, which unknown to the world before.’) And Smalley concluded (before
he defined as a period of one hundred years, a century of modernity shading the conclusion somewhat): ‘An emotional change has come
in a positive sense. ‘By our times I mean this modern period, the about in some hundred and fifty years. New has ceased to be a dirty
course of these last hundred years, at the end of which we now are, word. It may carry the sense of “improvement”, in that case it is
and of all of whose notable events the memory is fresh and clear praiseworthy. God has changed sides, he is no longer safely
enough. … The century which has passed I call modern times’ conservative’ (Smalley 1975: 115).
(James 1983: 123–5). Beryl Smalley made a study of hostility to the This judgement of a great historian of medieval intellectual life
new monastic orders during the twelfth century. She drew attention indicates the direction in which we ought to look for a sense of the
to the fact that this polemic gives us ‘an overview of a change of duration of the twelfth-century renaissance. It was a long twelfth
attitudes in regard to novelty’. The Premonstratensian canon Anselm, century, a long renaissance. I would happily follow those modern
Bishop of Havelberg, for instance, in the first book of his Dialogue scholars who extend Haskins’s rather narrow and confined
(c.1149), set out a theory of salvation-history whose object was to chronology, causing the century’s distinctive leap forward to begin a
integrate novelties into this new perspective. St Bernard himself, in bit earlier and reach its apogee a bit later.
his In Praise of the New Knighthood, hailed the novelty of the new As far as the beginnings go, I find it clarifies matters to see the
military orders (Leclercq and Rochais 1963: 214–15). M.-D. Chenu renaissance as emerging from that great affirmative movement of
credited twelfth-century theology with having put the march of Christian western Europe that we call the Gregorian Reform. Already
history on its onward path (Chenu 1957: 386–98). For Beryl Smalley, in 1901, in volume 3 of Lavisse’s Histoire de France, Achille Luchaire
this rehabilitation of novelty relied on St Paul’s appeal to ‘put off the defined a change whose scope should be extended to cover the
old man, and put on the new man, who has been created according whole of the Christian Latin West:
to God in the justice and holiness of the truth’ (Ephesians iv, 22–4); the period of our history that includes the last quarter of the eleventh century and
and its triumphant outcome was the foundation of the mendicant the first third of the following century, saw profound changes in French society.
orders by St Dominic and St Francis at the beginning of the The Church’s violent effort to regenerate itself and to throw off its feudal traits;
thirteenth century. Smalley shared my impression that the the definitive establishment of papal monarchy, whose reform and crusades
ushered in its universal power; the first attempts of the great feudal powers to
intellectuals of the twelfth century had ‘a lively awareness of doing
found states and governments; the recovery of the national monarchy in the
something new, of being new men’. M. H. Vicaire stressed that the person of Louis VI; the first attempts of the people in the towns and in the villages
Life of St Dominic in its opening pages used the terms ‘new’ and to free themselves; the awakening of independent reason which gives a new
‘novelty’ to describe the saint and his preachers; in so doing, the character to theological studies and allowed heresy to renew its strength; the
decisive progress of art manifested by the first masterpieces of vernacular historians who came after him. As far as intellectual centres are
literature, by the prodigious spread of Romanesque architecture and by the concerned, three emerged, one after the other, as places where the
creation of Gothic.
main theological innovations were made or developed: Laon,
(Luchaire 1901: 203–4) Chartres, Paris. An increase in the number of books and libraries,
Allowing for some simplifications and exaggerations, and a slightly perhaps as a result of destruction and of inadequate stock-taking,
dated vocabulary, we may say that here indeed are the essentials of did not emerge in the twelfth-century foreground: it was, rather, a
a movement that involved all the structures of a society which, thirteenth-century development. A significant feature, nevertheless,
around the year 1100, adopted the term ‘Christendom’ as the sign of was the growing interest of lay aristocrats in books, their building-up
its cohesion and its strength. of libraries, their commissioning of translations from Latin, and their
What has not been sufficiently noticed is that, unlike modern enthusiasm for genealogical literature such as Lambert of Ardres’
historians such as Luchaire in the passage just quoted, not one of History of the Counts of Guines (1194), on which Georges Duby
the intellectuals of the twelfth century, from Abelard to John of threw so much light (Duby 1977: 143–6). It was only at the turn of
Salisbury, with the exception of Bernard of Clairvaux, made the least the twelfth/thirteenth century that there was an acceleration in the
reference in his writings to the First Crusade and the conquest of trend towards having things written down: the preservation of royal
Jerusalem. Was this military enterprise (the expedition is termed and seigneurial archives produced a great change in administrative
bellum in all the sources, even if was a war that gradually became a practice ‘from memory to written record’ (to borrow Michael
holy war) part of another face of Christendom, a face quite distinct Clanchy’s expressive phrase) (Clanchy 1996).
from that of scholarship (studium)? If so, we would have to reflect Even more than Latin poetry, what now strikes us as the great
on the meaning of this split, this double aspect, in the vital force of twelfth-century genre is the vernacular romance in verse, then in
the Christian twelfth century. prose – a genre which Antiquity had barely sketched out. With the
I think we are now in a position to show that the twelfth century true birth of the historical romance was linked a growing sensitivity
really was the century of a great take-off rather than of a to the enduring quality and strong affirmation of the individual.
renaissance: a take-off of medieval thought and knowledge, History was the other genre to emerge strongly in the period.
between the eleventh century’s first cautious stumblings forward, Haskins’s scarce notes on this subject have crystallised in Bernard
and thirteenth-century scholasticism’s great setting of things in Guenée’s study demonstrating the twelfth century’s affirmation of a
order. This take-off involved every aspect of the Christian world. historical culture and the appearance, in terms of both method and
Christian society moved forward at the same time, if not at the same thinking, of several works of true historians, especially in the Anglo-
rate, in every field. And this take-off was that of a ‘long twelfth Norman realm with Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and,
century’, clearly marked out in a world and at a time when the above all, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Guenée 1990).
essential guidelines were bound to be religious – the Gregorian Since Haskins, the accent has been placed, above all, on the
Reform and the appearance of the mendicant orders. flowering of law, on the progress of the sciences and of philosophy.
What were the fields and forms of thought in which this take-off These subjects had been stimulated and nurtured by translations
was manifested most decisively and most distinctively? Haskins has from Greek and from Arabic, and by the activity of translators in
already identified and described the essentials here, even though lands bordering the Mediterranean, in Illyria, Sicily, southern Italy
some of the nuances have been shifted to some extent by those and above all in Spain, where Toledo was reconquered from the
Moors by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085 and became a great centre of
encounters promoting the acculturation of Christian learning with the appealed to logic and reason. A further essential change arose from
traditions, methods and achievements of Greek, Jewish and Arab the development of a new Christian conception of nature. Tullio
science. The twelfth-century renaissance was a summons: the Gregory has defined it in the following precise and profound terms:
response was a process of reception that meant much more than the ‘One of the chief experiences of the twelfth century – in the new
simple rediscovery of the ancient classics. framework of society and culture that took shape at that period –
The practice of law and the forming of legal collections were was the gradual progressive setting-out of an idea of the natural as
responses to the demands of ecclesiastical, royal and urban an ordered complex of phenomena which could be the object of
institutions. Lawyers proliferated wherever officials were needed: in rational enquiry, beyond the symbolic references that had
cathedral chapters, and in royal chanceries. The lawyers elaborated characterised the contemplation of nature in the early Middle Ages’
and diffused an urban legal culture. The renaissance of Roman Law (Gregory 1994). The domain of the miraculous grew more limited,
has traditionally been accorded huge importance: but perhaps it was while that of the marvellous, the extraordinary but not the
not the most important aspect of this legal explosion. Charles supernatural, expanded. Courtly literature did much to spread this
Radding has made a study of the changes in cognition which new sense of the marvellous.
modified conceptions of order, law, and society (Radding 1985). A A further great change in the twelfth-century’s sensibility and
new mentality developed around the idea of community rather than system of values related to work. Traditionally considered as a
that of hierarchy. Skills in discussion and debate tended to replace penance, and despised as manual activity, the concept of work
the mechanical rehearsal of authorities; and this opened the way to preached by monastic reformers in the twelfth century and set in a
the scholastic methods of the quaestio and the disputatio. The great place of honour in urban crafts (by contrast with the work of
crucible of the transformations of law was Bologna, where a key peasants and ‘vile people’) was the object of ideological promotion.
event was the composition of the Decretum of the Bolognese monk Though inferior to the system of liberal arts, the system of
Gratian, traditionally dated to c.1140. This gave a tremendous boost mechanical arts brought a certain dignity to the world of the
to the development of canon law, and that development in turn artisans. The list of unlawful or suspect métiers, which included the
would reinvigorate the whole field of law and legal thinking far professions of merchant and lay scholar-master, grew shorter. The
beyond ecclesiastical boundaries. Gratian’s clearly set-out collection work these offered freed the faithful from the charge of selling either
of authorities, with his own careful resolutions of their time or knowledge ‘which belonged only to God’. Martha was partly
contradictions, not only furnished a formidable armoury of texts, but rehabilitated vis-à-vis Mary (Constable 1995: 90–2). In Gothic art,
also presented a vast body of basic problems. It set going an the representation of active forms of conduct balanced that of
innovative movement of critical thinking, debate and research into contemplative forms. People observed that, according to Genesis (ii,
the theoretical and practical solutions to the problems of the new 15), God had placed man in paradise ‘ut operaretur et custodiret
Christian society of the twelfth century. In the realm of theology illum’: ‘to dress it and to keep it’ (Le Goff 1977: 173). Thus, before
where the new magistri ensured the development of scriptural the Fall and the imposition of work as punishment, there had been a
commentary towards more ‘scientific’ speculation, ‘theological divine calling of man to work.
science’, likewise inspired, developed from the sacred page into The intellectual development of the twelfth century contained
sacred doctrine (sacra doctrina). something hugely original in social terms: it emerged from the
The School of Chartres, in particular, expanded the use of reasons, monastic milieu and realised itself on urban workshop floors. The
if not of reason, alongside authorities. The masters’ modes of proof new masters were professional men, who sought to follow the model
set by others and to group themselves in corporations. Here was the Chenu, M.-D. (1974) ‘Civilisation urbaine et théologie: l’École de Saint-Victor au XII
birth of the universities, Bologna leading the way. By the end of the siècle’, Annales-Économies-Sociétés-Civilisations 29: 1253–1263.
Clanchy, M. T. (1996) From Memory to Written Record. England 1066–1307, 2nd
twelfth century, Paris and Oxford had begun to organise themselves. edn, London: Edward Arnold.
Finally, crowning this descent of values from heaven to earth, man Classen, P. (1966) ‘Die hohen Schulen und die Gessellschaft im 12. Jahrhundert’,
was no longer constantly symbolised by the figure of Job, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 48: 155–180.
overwhelmed by God’s omnipotence and the terrible trials He Constable, G. (1995) Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. The
imposed. Men could also read in Genesis – and underline this interpretation of Mary and Martha. The ideal of the imitation of Christ. The
orders of society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
passage too – that God had made man ‘in His own image’. d’Alverny, M.-T. (1968) ‘Maître Alain – “Nova et vetera”’, in Gandillac and Jeauneau:
Romanesque art, and still more Gothic art, bore witness to this. The 117–145.
crowning achievement of the twelfth century was the shaping, from Duby, G. (1977), trans. C. Postan, The Chivalrous Society, London: Edward Arnold.
this material, of Christian humanism, of the Christian Socratism Gandillac, M. de and Jeauneau, É. (eds) (1968) Entretiens sur la Renaissance du
mentioned earlier in this chapter. It is to be seen, for instance, in 12e siècle, Paris: Mouton.
Gregory, T. (1994) ‘L’ordine della natura e l’ordine del sapere’, in P. Rossi and C. A.
those two great adversaries Abelard and Bernard. Viano, Storia dell filosofia, II. Il Medioevo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 60–77.
Yet this take-off of the twelfth century also had a negative aspect: Guenée, B. (1980) Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval, Paris:
one that appeared very clearly in the century that followed. Strong Aubier Montaigne.
in their new rights, their new dignities, increasingly enclosed in the Haskins, C. H. (1927) The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, Mass.:
structures of the Church and of lay powers anxious to channel and Harvard University Press.
Iogna Prat, D. (1998) Ordonner et exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à
tame the often uncontrolled effervescence that had typified the l’hérésie, au judaïsme et à l’Islam 1000–1150, Paris: Aubier.
twelfth century, Christian establishments were determined to defend James, M. R. (ed. and trans.), revised C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (1983)
what they had gained – and to defend their purity. As R. I. Moore Walter Map. De nugis curialium. Courtiers’ Trifles, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1987) and Dominique Iogna Prat (1998) have so tellingly pointed Jeauneau, É. (1967) ‘Nani gigantum humeris insidentes’: essai d’interprétation de
out, Christendom became an institution of persecution, Bernard de Chartres’, Vivarium 5: 79–99.
Jeauneau, É. (1968) Nains et géants, in Gandillac and Jeauneau: 21–52.
marginalisation and exclusion. Behind the heretics, who were the Ladner, G. (1982) ‘Terms and ideas of renewal’, in R. L. Benson and G. Constable
most stubborn and most dangerous, the Jews who resisted new (eds) with C. D. Lanham, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century,
efforts to convert them, the homosexuals who had been relatively Oxford: Clarendon Press.
tolerated until then, the lepers who symbolised sinners in the Leclercq, J. (1969) ‘Les lettres de Guillaume de Saint-Thierry à Saint Bernard’,
impurity of their status, and right down to the poor in their Revue Bénédictine 79: 375–391.
Leclercq, J. and Rochais, H. (eds) (1963) S. Bernardi Opera, iii, Rome: Editiones
ambiguous condition: all these became objects of control, of Cistercienses.
rejection, of enclosure, and, at the worst, victims of pogroms, of Le Goff, J. (1977) Pour un autre Moyen Âge, Paris: Gallimard.
expulsions, of the Inquisition. This was the dark side of the ‘lovely’ Le Goff, J. (eds) (1993) Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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III. Les premiers Capetiens (987–1137), Paris: Hachette.
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